One man's wanderings through the MMO metaverse

Archive for January, 2009

On cue, Mythic released the news. But it’s more than just the return of the Choppa and the unveiling of the new Slayer. They’ve also announced a Darkness Falls type zone/dungeon, something the old DAoC community has been clamouring for.

Looking back at what the community has asked for since release, it’s a pretty interesting story. Almost everything we’ve asked for has been introduced. From class balancing, client/server improvements, to server performance and now soon zone domination, Slayer class and the spiritual successor to Darkness Falls. And all within a handful of months of launch, in the midst of a world recession, a WoW expansion and unprecedented competition in the MMO space. I’m rather stunned, actually.

I picked up Mines of Moria the other day. No, I’m not abandoning WAR, and that short stint through Middle Earth probably reinforced my love for WAR. But I’m not exactly resigning myself to playing a single MMO again, either. LotrO certainly has it’s charms. Charms that grow on ye the more ye play.

After a few hours over the span of two days levelling my dwarf Guardian, my first impressions are largely favourable. LotrO is a beautiful game, one can clearly see a ton of effort went into the set design. Magnificent texture work, beautiful effects… for a solo and small group PVE game set in Middle Earth, scenery is important. More important than anything else, and running some of the very nicely executed quests, ambling through fields of lush green grass, forests full of trees that look like trees rather than cardboard cutout flora, I was only missing two things. Beating other players over the head, and the cool-factor of playing my greenskin or my chaos toons. (more…)

Mythic continues it’s assault on the WAR blogosphere with packages sent to some well known WAR bloggers hinting at something coming up involving Witch Elves and…pink hearts? Hmm. Can only mean that love is in the air, although when it comes to Dark Elves that becomes a worrying prospect.

2 days to go to the Slayer/Choppa announcement, woot woot. I’ll be terribly disappointed if that’s not what happens come 29 Jan.

And on a completely irrevelant and pointless sidenote, Skabs dinged RR 18 and got him some zekzy Tier2 purple RvR inf gear and a new hat. When simple things make you smile again, you know you’ve got yourself a winner.

Lastly, I have to send props out a poster named Yak on WHA that came up with a brilliant UI compilation, called YakUI. I’ve always been a big fan of custom UI’s in WoW, and YakUI is the first really decent, attractive, functional UI I’ve seen. It’s certainly a major step up from the default one. Head on over to this forum thread and have a looksee.

A thought that has occurred to me, and popped up in the community as well, is why not enable an XP lock option that would let us prevent our character from levelling past a Tier. Many, if not most, WAR players right now who enjoy the ORvR have taken an interesting stand. They’ve rerolled and are staying within the lower tiers as long possible.

Fact is for open warfare, the lack of Tier4 level CC and some high damage abilities (1K+ per hit) makes for a less spammy, more tactical fight. ORvR in Tiers 1 and 2 really does feel like the way WAR is meant to be played.

So it makes sense to give players the option to be able to lock their XP gain at levels 11,21 and 31, right? (more…)

Warhammer’s UI is eminently moddable. Out of the box it serves every purpose you could think of, certainly. There is no real need for mods. But would we be human if we didn’t attempt to fix things that didn’t need to be fixed? No sir!

That’s not very clear or readable, is it. Hmm. Well, after the break a bigger version, along with a list of the mods used to make it all look the way it does, and a short description of each.